When writing the news article about the competition winners in April I was not only surprised by the sheer amount of participants in the last Rookie Rumble, but also by the hardware choice of the Rookie Champion. Paulie_AU from – duh – Australia competed using the inevitable Core i7 4770K, an ASRock Z87 Extreme4 and a set of G.SKILL PI memory. The component choice is interesting on the motherboard and memory side as the ASRock plus G.SKILL combination seems particularly well-liked by former Rookie Champions too.

I had a look at what components the previous winners of the Rookie Rumble competition series used for their system build. Check out the list below.

Contest

Name

Motherboard

Memory

Rookie Rumble #4

Paulie_AU

ASRock Z87 Extreme4

G.SKILL PIS

Rookie Rumble #3

Morper

GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 5 / ASUS Maximus VI Extreme

G.SKILL TridentX / Corsair Dominator & Vengeance

Rookie Rumble #2

Psyins

ASRock Z87 OC Formula

G.SKILL TridentX

Rookie Rumble #1

Mmichel

ASRock Z87 OC Formula

G.SKILL TridentX

Of all Champions, it seems Morper has the wildest array of hardware to compete with. He used two different motherboards and no less than three types of memory kits to win the Rookie Rumble #3. I wonder what the next Rookie Champion will used. Let’s find out from May 10 forward!

A little factoid that is totally not written anywhere is that the ASRock extreme series board max out at 1.8v vDimm. A little disappointing as a new person to OC (and after buying some proven PIS). If I had known this when building my first PC in 8 years (goodbye laptops) I would have spent more for a OC specific board.

Next purchase - OC specific board.

Great comp though - really having fun on various benchmarks. Next time round will be running a dedicated W7 OS instead of my everyday gaming configuration, hopefully will be able to eeek out some improvements.